Modernizing employee communication with affordable and modern HIPAA-compliant messaging
COMPANY
Dartmouth-Hitchcock
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
EMPLOYEES
10,000+
DEPLOYMENT
On-Premises
Dartmouth-Hitchcock (D-H) is a nonprofit academic health system that serves a population of 1.9 million in New England.
Across the system, D-H annually has more than 1.7 million outpatient visits, performs nearly 20,000 surgeries, discharges more than 25,000 patients, and cares for 31,000 emergency visits. When the time came to formalize existing ad-hoc usage of instant messaging, D-H needed to find a modern secure messaging solution that strictly adhered to HIPAA regulations and other important security requirements.
The problem
Without a formally adopted secure messaging solution, employees who were sitting right next to each other were forced to utilize the classic "stand up and yell at each other" method of communication far too often. Accordingly, in late 2013 D-H began evaluating business IM solutions including Microsoft Lync and the open source Openfire Server in particular. But Lync (now Skype for Business) was extremely cost prohibitive at scale and Openfire was missing a few important security features. Due to D-H's strict healthcare regulatory environment, most cloud solutions were immediately out of the running as well.
Competing priorities for resources meant that it was going to be difficult to justify the high costs associated with traditional messaging platforms like Skype. Open source alternatives tended to sacrifice security features, leaving them minimally useful in a regulated environment like ours.
Elias Hunt Technical Lead
The solution
D-H deployed the data center edition of the on-premises Workadi Server and hasn't looked back since. Leveraging Workadi Server's modular design, D-H is able to keep all PHI-related storage secure and encrypted at rest behind the firewall while hanging a front-end Workadi Server on the DMZ for external employee access. The powerful combination of the award-winning Workadi clients across desktops and mobile devices ensures that employees never miss a beat during their work days. Here are some of the key benefits D-H has derived from their Workadi deployment:
Workadi has provided a solid low cost IM application for D-H for several years. However, they have also been willing to collaborate in order to develop a platform that can adhere to the strict regulatory requirements of healthcare. This is an example of a win/win relationship that can help drive down the cost of healthcare. Workadi supports mobile devices and with its latest update it provides capabilities that are comparable to more expensive products categorized as "secure texting".
Bill Weyrick Director Information Systems